


Gift Shop

by Jayne L (JayneL)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-15
Updated: 2013-05-15
Packaged: 2017-12-11 21:58:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/803712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JayneL/pseuds/Jayne%20L
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's been one month since Castiel Fell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gift Shop

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers through 8.22 only. I am unspoiled for 8.23, and have written this accordingly.

Castiel awakens in his bed. He stays there a while, listening to the muted humming of the mechanical systems that keep the bunker habitable: air circulation, heat generation, water conveyance. He lets stillness and his thoughts press him down into his mattress.

Eventually, as he has come to expect, pressure from his bladder forces him into motion, up and out of bed. He needs to urinate these days. And defecate. And sleep, and eat, and shower to make himself clean, and wear clothing to make himself comfortable.

Fortunately, he never feels it necessary to be clean-shaven. After all the rest, he hasn't the patience left for shaving. He hasn't done it in weeks.

Castiel urinates, and defecates, and showers to make himself clean. He doesn't shave. He covers his nakedness with warm clothing, and goes to the kitchen to prepare something to eat.

It's been one month since he Fell.

* * *

Curing Crowley went like this:

After the fourth injection, he stopped cursing the Winchesters.

After the sixth, he started again.

After the eighth, he dislocated his own shoulder with the force of his desperate, writhing struggle against his shackles, and his curses devolved into unintelligible howling.

After the ninth, he began to weep.

"Lucky number thirteen," Dean said tightly some time later, as he helped Sam prepare another syringe. And it was.

Sam's hands shook as he unlocked the warded iron cuffs of Crowley's chains. Dean didn't so much as glance at Crowley's face as he positioned himself beside his slumped body and jolted his shoulder unceremoniously back into place. Crowley's eyes fixed dully on the first open cuff as Sam dropped it to clank on the blood- and spittle-flecked floor.

Castiel stood invisibly beside the table upon which Sam and Dean had ordered their curative tools. He had been standing there for hours.

"Parity, Castiel," Metatron had told him, after Castiel had slain the nephil and harrowed Heaven. "Ultimately, it all comes down to parity."

While Sam was wracked with the pain of the final incantation and Dean hovered anxiously over him, Crowley fumbled one of the cuffs off the floor and used its rusty edge to cut his own throat.

Castiel watched Sam and Dean rush to kneel--far too late--in the spreading lake of Crowley's blood. He considered parity.

* * *

Castiel reads selections from the bunker's vast library randomly and without urgency. He inventories the weapons stored in the armoury, and in the trunk of the Impala, and on the wall of Dean's bedroom. He learns--mostly through trial and error--how to maintain both himself and his shelter without miracles, the way humans must. One particularly enlightening day, he starts downloading stockpiles of instructional videos to Sam's laptop in preparation for the day when the internet finally fails.

He feels a low, buzzing pressure constantly at the back of his mind, like the near-subliminal noise of static from two rooms away. He can't be sure--he's lost the part of himself that possessed the ability to find out--but he thinks it's Jimmy, trapped and screaming.

* * *

Castiel's Fall went like this:

"Dean," he said. When Dean turned to him, hurt and disappointed and distrustful, Castiel took his face in his hands and kissed him.

He was submitting, at last, to God's plan. The plan God had made for sealing Heaven away, at least, if none of His others. Finally, Castiel would become a hammer, an instrument, a tool and nothing more: he would Fall, and his Fall would lock Heaven's tarnished gates closed. He would be useful; he would be used.

He would be used up. Past any point of coming back.

It was knowing he wouldn't come back that made him press his mouth to Dean's, plainly and chaste, for the first and last time. He knew Dean was still angry with him (angry again); moreover, he knew Dean neither needed nor wanted this from him. He wasn't surprised when Dean froze, when his breath caught in his lungs and his body tensed as if he were about to push Castiel roughly away.

He didn't expect the soft, wounded sound Dean made then, or the way his mouth parted to return the kiss, to ease it deeper. He didn't expect Dean's hands to make fists in his coat and tug him closer. He didn't expect to be held.

In the moment before pain tore through his grace, it was knowing he wouldn't come back that made Castiel think frantically, _I've made another mistake--_

* * *

Castiel drives from the bunker into town, passing cars like litter in ditches and fetched up against curbs.

He found the controls for the grocery store's sound system and shut it off weeks ago; now, except for the drone of refrigerators and freezers, the store is quiet. When Castiel hears another car in the lot outside, he stuffs what he can into a single duffle, draws his handgun, and positions himself under cover facing the door.

The young woman who enters has wide eyes and straight blonde hair gone shaggy at the ends. She's dressed sensibly for travelling, except that her hands are empty. She's unarmed.

When he calls, "That's far enough," she stops dead, just inside the threshold.

"Please." She turns slowly in the direction of his voice, holding her empty hands up and palms-out. "I saw your car, I thought--" He steps out where she can see him and she falters, the look on her face falling from taut hope to dismay. Castiel assumes he's not what she expected. "Please," she repeats finally, "you're the first person I've seen in weeks," and part of Castiel resonates with the desperation in her voice. "Do you know what happened?"

"The Rapture," he says, and her wide eyes brim up with tears, and she clutches at one of the necklaces she wears. "And, simultaneously, the Agony," he continues, and her alarm turns faintly puzzled. Castiel reminds himself that Kevin's notes on those lines in the tablets had been uniform frustration; it was only in hindsight that Castiel had been able to render sense from Kevin's confusion. On this subject, at least, the Bible can't be blamed for its inadequacy.

Castiel lowers his gun, but doesn't put it away. "What are you?" he asks, because he has no other way of knowing now. When his question penetrates her shock, the girl bristles and begins forming her mouth around a lie or evasion. Castiel shakes his head, forestalling her. He has no patience for denials. "You're not human. You wouldn't still be here if you were. What are you?"

"Werewolf," she admits eventually, warily. "My name's Kate," she adds.

"This is your paradise, werewolf," Castiel tells her. Neither Heaven nor Hell, but-- "Purgatory on Earth."

* * *

Paradise began like this:

Castiel awoke on the floor on the bunker, hollowed of grace and alone.

**Author's Note:**

>  _After a glimpse over the top_  
>  _The rest of the world becomes a gift shop._  
>  \--The Tragically Hip, ['Gift Shop'](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R7VChN-jKc)


End file.
